Four bidders with at least $7 million to spend drove the price of a waterfront property in Tauranga to $7.51m at auction this week.
Bidding on the four-bedroom nearly new house on 938sqm of beach front on Oceanbeach Road, in Mount Maunganui, started at $6m, already well above its 2018 rating valuation of $3.59m.
Simon Anderson, who heads up Bayleys Real Estate in the Bay of Plenty, says it was the highest residential price for Tauranga this year.
He said the four bidders, three local and one from out of town with connections to the Mount, all realised that this was an exceptional home on a large block of land.
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“The result wasn’t a surprise for us, it shows how desirable this can be.”
The six-year old house had all the bells and whistles, and was right on the sand dunes. Photo / Supplied
Bayleys agent Kay Ganley, who marketed the six-year-old architect-designed house, said the house was “beautiful architecture with all the bells and whistles”.
Anderson said that unlike previous years, now only 10-20% of the buyers for the top-end properties were from outside the region. “It shows you how much Tauranga has grown as a city. Previously the buyers for these places would be a Waikato dairy farmer or an Auckland businessman, but now we’ve got local money.
“The four bidders all had budgets of $7m plus – that's $28m in the auction room looking for a home.”
He added that the outsiders were often people trading a big place in town for somewhere at the beach where they could work from home.
A house at Coast Boulevard, Papamoa, sold for $2.55m, the highest price for non-water outlook property. Photo / Supplied
Last month, another property at Oceanbeach Road, also marketed by Ganley, sold under the hammer for $5.6m – almost $2m above its 2018 rating valuation. The near-new beachfront home, snapped up by expat buyers, was the second house on the city’s prime beachfront strip to fetch over $5m in a fortnight.
Ganley told OneRoof that bidding was “fast and furious”.
Another record was smashed in suburban Papamoa when a four-year old four-bedroom house at Coast Boulevard sold under the hammer for $2.55m. The stylish 277sqm property with a pool and two living areas had a 2018 rating valuation of just $1.48m.
“This was the highest price, the best sale in Papamoa for a property without an outlook,” Anderson said.
“We’re not surprised, it was one helluva property and that’s in the ballpark of what we expected. There was strong interest at the open homes and a pre-auction offer after only two weeks.”
The Papamoa house had a pre-auction offer after only two weeks. Photo / Supplied
The property, which was marketed by Bayleys agents Angela and Nick Fleet, sold to Auckland buyers who were moving from elsewhere in the Mount.
OneRoof records show the highest settled price in the last six months for Papamoa Beach is $4.155m, in a suburb where median value shot up 36% to $980,000 in the last year. Suburban Papamoa median value was up 30% to $895,000 while Mount Maunganui was up 41% to $1.12m.
Anderson said buyers were competing for good quality properties, but vendors were holding back from listing their properties if they couldn’t find a place to move to.
Another house at Oceanbeach Road sold in May for $5.6m. Photo / Supplied
“The shelves are bare, there’s not a lot to look at, at all. People don’t have the confidence [to sell] because they won’t be caught without a home. Our job is to provide a safety net to give them confidence they’ll get something to move to.
“If only they all stopped holding back. It’s not that there’s less property selling, it’s just that there’s no stock because it is selling so fast.”
